Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> A Legitimate Reason to Hate the Zune (And Microsoft Too)
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Here's the situation: Microsoft has agreed to pay a portion of
> | the profits from the sales of the Zune to a record company
> | (Universal) because the Zune will undoubtedly be used to
> | store unpurchased songs.
Microsoft and the RIAA and the MPAA don't seemto have any concept of
"personal use".
If I have 12 CDs, and I rip them to MP3, then install them on my PDA,
and lock up the CDs and leave them at home, am I a pirate?
The RIAA and Microsoft wants me to pay additional fee for the copy that
gets loaded into the PDA. They would have a legitimate concern if I
put these MP3 recordings onto my web site so that I could access it
while I was out of the office, THAT would be a serious problem. If I
started passing my PDA around so that others could dupe my song
collection, that would be a problem.
Normally, the CD is licensed for household use. I can listen to it,
and my wife or children (living with me) could listen to it. But
that's pretty much the limit. One of the problems with Napster is that
they tried to convince gullible people that "sharing" a copy of a song
with a few friends, by putting it on a personal computer and running a
program that effectively made that computer accessible to millions of
users, was somehow "fair use".
I'm very surprised that the RIAA didn't go for criminal convictions on
that one. They won their lawsuit, and the courts pretty much made it
very clear that they felt that Napster's claims were absurd. They
were.
Eventually music publishers established some sane pricing and royalty
management protocols, and worked out some very reasonable and practical
licenses.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is right, even though they grossly overstate
the amount of piracy.
Anyone walking the streets of NYC on a late summer or early autumn can
see streetside tables with pirated copies of popular movies and music,
laid out for sale for as low as $3 each, even though the exact same
movies and CDs are selling at normal stores for $20 each.
On the other hand, Microsoft loves to overstate their claims of piracy.
They would like publishers to believe that 50% of the media used is
pirated. That means that there would be one pirated copy for every
legal copy obtained. Microsoft would like to claim that my MP3s were
also pirated, even though I very carefully do NOT put them on ANY form
of shared media, including shared directories.
> | [...]
> | Here it is important to remember a few simple things. The
> | money goes to the Universal, not to the artists.
Not entirely true. Most artists get a percentage of the royalties,
depending on what they've done. There are union and ASCAP minimums for
composing, arranging, performing, and producing the records. The
publisher also gets a share, but so does the retailer. Universal might
be lucky to get 30% of the retail price, and often as little as 10%.
> | [...]
> |
> | Microsoft's move sets a bad precedent and turns all consumers into
> | thieves without evidence.
> `----
It's a "sweetener" to a deal that could be ugly if Microsoft didn't
offer these gestures of good-will. Keep in mind that Apple was able to
come up with a really good solution because they were willing to work
very closely with the publishers to make sure that they got a "fair
price".
I remember selling VCRs back in 1977-8. When movies first came out for
them, they cost over $100 each. The publisher had factored piracy into
the price. And it wasn't entirely unjustified. Many video stores
would have some form of 'rental' program where the customer purchased
one movie and paid an "exchange fee" for trading for another movie. I
was working with a store and brokered a deal with my studio rep and my
manager, where we would buy more movies and pay them almost 40% of the
exchange fees we were collecting. The final deal ended up being about
50/50, but we got better prices on the movies if we purchased more
movies that we had originally proposed. Before long, we were doing
more profit from the Video rentals, than we were making on the sales of
the VCRs. But the important thing is that the studio was making good
money too.
The key point is that the studio could have very easily demanded all of
their inventory back, and could have siezed other assets as well.
Instead, we made the initial offer, and made it a generous offer. They
were actually quite happy to accept the offer, and with a bit of
barganing actually got a better deal than they had been getting when
they were selling us movies for $100 each and expecting customers to
pay that much. The irony is that we quickly found that there was a
lower price, around $30, where customers would buy the used movies, for
their own personal libraries. Even though they could tape the movies
off the broadcast, or from HBO, they chose to purchase the movies -
once an equilibrium of price/supply/demand was finally reached. Over
time, that equilibrium has shifted down to $20 for new releases and as
little as $6 for "oldies but goodies".
It's beginning to look like Microsoft is beginning to see it's own
shifting equilibrium, watching it's market power erode. Microsoft has
taken a beating with the Ipod and they are reeling, they didn't take as
much of the game market as they had hoped, and the PS/3 could cut even
more deeply into that market. OpenOffice, FireFox, and other OSS and
Java based applications are eroding revenues from MS-Office, IE based
services, and Visual Studio.
Even Windows Media player is suffering from media starvation. The
prices are too high, and the selections too small. It's no big deal
getting a copy of a top 40 album from the 2 years, but try and get a
copy of Jethro Tull's Aqualung, or some niche recording from 30 years
ago.
Microsoft really needs to get it into their heads that the real "gold"
isn't in being "just like" others, but offering breadth and depth.
Google made a fortune by archiving and indexing usenet newsgroups and
publicly available web pages offered by almost anybody who wanted their
sites to be found, then selling some advertizing that matched those
specific interests.
Microsoft has the leverage and relationships to capture content of
major publications for the last 50 years, and make that content
searchable. imagine getting pr-newswire for the last 30 years, being
able to see exactly when something happened, and when it was first
publicly announced, instead of relying on some wiki that tries to
catalogue some announcements that may be weeks, even months out of
synch.
> http://www.applematters.com/index.php/section/comments/a-legitimate-reason-to-hate-the-zune-and-microsoft-too/
>
>
> Similar to WGA. Guilty until proven innocent (WGA cleared).
>
> A case of projection?
>
> http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/2803
>
> Bill Gates' piracy confession
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